All in all, I had it pretty good compared to a lot of other gay teenagers back in the day.   I need to remind myself of this from time to time.   It wasn’t the best, not by any means.   But I never doubted that mom loved me.   Even so, we had an unspoken don’t ask, don’t tell agreement almost right up to the day she died.   It was okay for me to read gay novels and bring gay newspapers into the house. It was okay for me to not date girls.   It was okay for me to draw sketches and take photos of beautiful guys.   It was okay for me to march in gay rights protests.   I just had not to say it.   Sad to think, but this was actually a pretty good deal for a gay kid back in the early 1970s.   But not every gay kid had that deal.   Not by a long shot.   And even now, for some gay kids of my generation, it will always be a time before Stonewall.

Der Spiegel asks the question…

Is Germany Really as Liberal as It Seems?

A gay couple that was seeking to open a restaurant near the Bavarian town of Freying received an anonymous letter early last year. “Stay away. We don’t need people like you here,” it read. Additional threats followed, including a faked obituary and an open, though anonymous, letter claiming that one of the two was HIV-positive and that there was a danger that diners could be infected. The restaurant was never opened.

That it’s still hard for a gay kids in Bavaria even now is unsurprising.   It’s…Bavaria.   And it was probably a lot harder to be a gay kid in Bavaria, or from a Bavarian family, back when I was a teenager.   Probably still pretty hard for those gay Bavarian kids, even now, all grown up though they may be.   Impossible even.

Secondary school teacher Gabriel Stängle is likewise concerned about public school students in Baden-Württemberg. The 41-year-old, lives in the Black Forest and launched an online petition in November of last year that had been signed some 90,000 times by last Friday evening. His campaign is entitled: “Future — Responsibility — Learning: No Curriculum 2015 under the Ideology of the Rainbow.” Stängle’s primary concern is what he describes as sexual “reeducation.”

Stängle is angry with the state government — a coalition of the center-left Social Democrats and the Green Party — which is currently developing an educational program for public schools which will include the “acceptance of sexual diversity.” Students are to learn the “differences between the genders, sexual identities and sexual orientations.” The goal is to enable students to “be able to defend equality and justice.”

Stängle sees this as being in “direct opposition to health education as it has been practiced thus far.” Completely missing, he writes, is an “ethical reflection on the negative potential by-products of LSBTTIQ (which stands for “lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgender, intersexuals and queer people) lifestyles, such as the increased danger of suicide among homosexual youth, the increased susceptibility to alcohol and drugs, the conspicuously high rate of HIV infection among homosexual men, the substantially lower life-expectancy among homo- and bisexual men, the pronounced risk of psychological illness among men and women living as homosexuals.”

Most of the petitions’ signatories live in the rural, conservative regions of Germany’s southwest…

That would be Bavaria…

…and the majority wishes to remain anonymous. Some signed with handles such as “The Gay-Hater.”

And probably a lot of them have gay kids of their own.   Who they love very much.   Conditionally.

Stay in the closet…get married…don’t disgrace your family…or we won’t love you anymore…we’ll hate you for disgracing us…   Still hard for a gay kids in Bavaria even now.   Probably a lot harder back when I was a teenager.   Just saying.